When money arrived from my mother's estate, I couldn't touch it for months - I had no idea what it meant, or what to do with it. This is a piece about inheritance, about fear dressed up as responsibility, and about the skill neither my mother nor I was ever taught. It closes with an invitation to a Lighthouse Lab on financial confidence, Tuesday 8th September.
For many people, January is the moment for change. I'd argue September is the true one. Drawing on John O'Donohue's writing on thresholds and real stories from a coach, a designer, and a recruiter, this piece is an invitation to use the next twelve weeks well and a free printable worksheet to help you do it.
A year ago, I started a new chapter: coaching and Her Circle, a community for women in business in West Cork. Getting ready to celebrate that, I felt something I didn't expect: unease. Here's what I've learned this year about celebrating honestly, without pretending I've arrived anywhere, and why doing it together might just be an act of rebellion.
I press the number 4 in the elevator, turn left twice, and I'm back in the corridors of my mother's workplace - a room full of women who built something real while somehow also building a life around it. When she retired, she asked me a question I still can't fully answer for her. This is what stayed with me after a conversation about flexibility this week.
The first question I ask a stranger is never small talk - I want to know what they've dedicated their life to. Today it was a farmer at the sauna. A year ago it was me, closing a business I'd built over thirteen years and starting again from nothing. September has a way of turning summer's dreaming into real decisions - and this year it's brought me to a conversation with Karen O'Reilly of EmployFlex about what's changing in how people find work.
There's a story about wildland firefighters who are told, in the moment of greatest danger, to drop their tools and run - and who, again and again, choose to hold on instead. It costs them their lives. I've been asking my clients a version of the same question ever since: what are you holding onto that, if you dropped it, would let you move with more ease? My own answer came from three generations of women in my family who never once took a relaxing holiday.
I went to an art school. The visual arts department was my world — drawing, journalling, making things that could speak without me having to. Over the years, something else emerged. A part of me that loves to facilitate, that comes alive in front of a room. Making videos is where these two run into each other.
I've been wanting to make videos for a while. But every time I get close, a younger version of me puts her foot down. Too scary. Too exposed. This week, with a little help from George Hanover and the women of Her Circle, I finally pressed record. This post is about what happened next - and about a Lighthouse Lab coming up for anyone else who's been wanting to show up more but can't quite get there.
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